Film Reviews by griggs

Most films about radical politics focus on the act. Running on Empty is more interested in the afterlife: the slow erosion, the routines built around never settling anywhere for too long.

River Phoenix is something else as the son inheriting pressures no teenager should carry. The film refuses easy moral arithmetic — the parents have damaged their children, but there’s real warmth here, and that affection makes everything far more painful than a story about resentment ever could.

At times it’s too composed when it should really wound. I kept willing it to sit inside the pain, not just observe it.

But it stays with you. Consequences, it turns out, don’t run. They wait.

Hal Ashby somehow pulls off the impossible: a film so upfront about its politics that it never feels like it’s lecturing you. Coming Home is loose, warm and deeply human, so the Vietnam-era anger flows through you rather than at you.

The soundtrack is wall-to-wall period gold, but it’s the performances that bring it all the way home. Fonda is magnetic. And watching Jon Voight here made me mourn seventies Jon Voight before Trump and the culture wars melted his brain — soulful, vulnerable, politically engaged, and extraordinary.

Not quite a masterpiece, but close enough that walking away feels like a betrayal.

Kurt Russell doing what he does best — getting into trouble, glaring hard, and sheer-willing his way out of it.

The first act had me wondering if I’d accidentally wandered into a car ad, but where most thrillers stall in the middle, Breakdown keeps its foot down. Once it properly kicks in, it barely lets up, and those final twenty minutes left me winded.

Then it gets odd. Gloriously, bewilderingly odd. Each new escalation crashes into the next like a motorway incident nobody planned but everyone slows down to gawp at.

Not quite firing on all cylinders — the setup creaks and the resolution strains credibility — but 90 minutes of lean, white-knuckle tension with Russell at his most Kurtrussellian? I’ll take it every time.

Pure, sweat-soaked nonsense — and that’s the point.

Crank stars Jason Statham as a hitman injected with a synthetic poison that’ll kill him the moment his heart rate drops, and the film commits to this ludicrous premise with the manic energy of a man who cannot afford to slow down. It’s revved so high from the opening frame that you barely get time to question any of it.

Does it outstay its welcome? Somehow, not really. Is it art? Absolutely not. But it knows exactly what it is: loud, grubby, hyperactive chaos delivered with total conviction.

As pure, cranked-up mayhem, it’s stupidly, gloriously enjoyable.

Still not sure what to make of this. That’s either a sign of something genuinely complex, or of something that simply can’t make up its mind. With Watchmen, I suspect the latter.

The opening, though — genuinely arresting. Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ plays over an alternate history stitched into real American iconography, and for a few minutes Snyder seems to have made something extraordinary. The rest of the film never quite lives up to it.

From there, it’s a slog dressed in spectacle. Snyder can frame a shot like nobody’s business, but struggles to make you care whose business it is. The performances range from committed to waxwork, and the film’s grand moral murk keeps getting flattened into slow-motion poses and glowering silhouettes. It all becomes oddly exhausting: a superhero film desperate to prove its seriousness while rarely trusting its characters to feel like people.

Worth seeing once, and that opening really does land. But for a film that asks who watches the watchmen — I found myself checking the clock.

Something prickly and promising lurks beneath the surface of Urchin — and like its spiny namesake, it’s easier to admire from a distance than to fully embrace.

Harris Dickinson clearly knows how to frame a shot, and there are moments where the atmosphere and imagery cut deep. But the film keeps drifting into dreamlike detours that feel very first-time filmmaker: portentous, self-conscious, distracting. The real dramatic question is sitting right there in the centre. Has Mike fallen through society’s cracks, or engineered his own collapse? The film seems oddly uninterested in finding out, content to skim the surface rather than dig beneath it. That can work — but only if the foundations feel solid, and Urchin never quite gets there.

There’s a sharp director in here, no question. But sharp edges without depth just scratch. Promising, frustrating, and too content to mistake mystery for meaning.

New York’s iconic skyline acquires an unwanted tenant in Q: The Winged Serpent, Larry Cohen’s gloriously scrappy 1982 creature feature. Q nests its Aztec god Quetzalcoatl in the spire of the Chrysler Building — a neat sidestep from the Empire State’s usual King Kong duties — and has enormous fun with a premise that takes itself just seriously enough.

Bodies keep turning up on rooftops, the NYPD flails about beneath the skyline, and Michael Moriarty’s twitchy jazz-pianist crook blunders into the middle of it all. Moriarty is flat-out electric here, all nervy improvisation and squirrelly energy in a film that could easily have settled for cardboard. Somehow he makes the whole thing feel half a step away from a Scorsese burnout wandering into the wrong movie.

The swooping stop-motion ambition keeps bumping into the limits of the budget, but Cohen never lets the film sag. He moves through the chaos with the brisk confidence of someone who knows exactly what kind of film he’s making. Breezy, unpretentious, and oddly charming — even if it never quite soars.

Not quite great, then — but genuinely likeable. Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut never fully settles on what it wants to be, drifting between gentle comedy and heavier material about grief, guilt and reinvention without quite committing to either. The laughs mostly land as faint smiles, and when it reaches for profundity, it starts to plod.

Still, there’s real warmth here. June Squibb carries the film with ease, giving Eleanor enough wit and bruised humanity to keep her worth spending time with, even when the script tidies up the messier edges too neatly. Johansson shows promise behind the camera too, even if the film occasionally feels a little too careful and sanded-down.

A modest, easygoing little film — call it Eleanor the Pretty Good.

Ishiguro’s debut novel gets its adaptation, and it mostly drifted — scenes floated by in a haze, building atmosphere without ever building much momentum.

The ending was where it really lost me. The film mistook vagueness for depth, circling a revelation that never properly landed. What should have hit like a gut punch arrived with all the force of a shrug.

The view was pale, alright.

Frankenheimer’s neo-noir feels like a hand of cards nobody really wanted to play. The kidnap-blackmail setup has the makings of a lean thriller, and he shoots the LA grime with real conviction. Roy Scheider is quietly compelling, and Ann-Margret is frankly better than the film deserves; a few more scenes between them might have been the ace this needed.

But 52 Pick-Up mostly just shrugs. The sleaze lands heavily rather than edgily, several sequences curdle into outright misogyny, and there’s little wit or plot ingenuity to compensate. The film keeps confusing ugliness with edge. Elmore Leonard adapted his own novel, which makes the flat dialogue even stranger. You keep waiting for the clever play that never comes.

Grimly watchable, mind. More a chore than a thriller.

Watching this straight after Saturday Night Fever was a mistake of my own making — like expecting a strobe light and getting a reading lamp instead.

I should have realised that this is just Metropolitan with a disco ball hanging over it. The clubs may be louder, but the characters still talk like they’re trapped at the same Manhattan dinner party — the dialogue so stilted it’s hard to take any of them seriously. Amusing for about ten minutes, then numbing.

I kept waiting for something messier to break through — some hint of hunger, vanity, bad decisions, actual sweat. It never arrives. Finely shot, but the writing is too in love with its own archness to land anywhere that matters.

Not quite a disaster. More a film that grooves along at half-pace before the lights come up, and you realise you’ve barely moved from your spot — and neither has it.

Fifty years on, the satire still crackles — though whether
Network fully deserves its towering reputation is a question worth sitting with.

Finch is volcanic and magnificent, even if, once you notice the rhythm, he’s often just bellowing with frightening conviction. Dunaway and Holden knowingly lean into archetypes rather than rounded people, which is either part of the joke or part of the problem depending on your mood. Lumet keeps the whole thing moving at a sprint, and with a cast this stacked — Robert Duvall all sharp ambition, Ned Beatty turning a boardroom speech into Old Testament prophecy, Beatrice Straight quietly breaking your heart in five minutes — there’s always something to grab onto.

None of the hairline cracks dent the enthusiasm much, mind. It’s still thrilling, still funny, still infuriating in exactly the right ways. The signal’s degraded a touch with age, but the broadcast remains essential.

Jersey may be across the river from New York, but Cop Land is frontier country: a commuter-belt Western where the town sheriff is half-forgotten, the locals are corrupt, and the law has quietly become something the powerful lend to each other.

Freddy Heflin, deaf in one ear and dismissed by everyone, is the nominal lawman in a town that polices itself. Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, and Ray Liotta circle him like vultures with badges, and they’re magnetic. Stallone clearly wanted this to be his serious-actor moment — the pivot from franchise muscle to craft. Noble aim. The problem is that his supporting cast keep outgunning him in his own film — and Cop Land is built for a wounded-sheriff reckoning. When it reaches for its High Noon moment, you feel the gap between the myth and the man.

Still, it nearly gets away with it: enjoyable, atmospheric, loaded with potential, and just a few dusty miles short of the landmark it wanted to be. Almost rides off into the sunset. Almost.

A subject this incendiary should feel impossible to approach with calm, yet Alice Diop does exactly that. The courtroom is dense with testimony, but the film is really about what testimony can’t reach: glances, pauses, the weight of something that may never fully make sense. Diop directs with empathy and an almost unnerving patience, refusing the easy route of judgement or sensationalism. The beauty is quiet and strange, right through to a final scene that lands like a deep breath you didn’t realise you were holding.

There’s a reason they call it The Outfit. Not just the mob — the whole thing feels like a suit cut from the same cloth: functional, no-nonsense, and unlikely to turn heads at a party.

John Flynn keeps things flat and airless on purpose. Nobody talks more than they have to, nobody emotes unless cornered, and the film moves with the grim efficiency of men treating crime like shift work. Even so, it somehow feels longer than it is.

The real pleasure is the cast. Duvall leads on paper, but Robert Ryan is the noir sun around which the whole film gravitates. The supporting faces are a roll-call of classic noir, and fans will clock each arrival with quiet glee. Baker and Black bring some late-period bite, but the film belongs to an older, colder generation who knew exactly how this sort of thing was done.

Solid. Unshowy. Exactly what it says on the tin.